A fucking megalon painter from Kavi Gupta's (Chicago) already very handsome roster. Go see one in person and then make your uncle (or whoever buy it). Ok. Go!

No real intro this time. You all have plenty to read as it is. Anything I could possibly say now, would just be said by him already into the 11th dimension (down there). Adam Scott, fucking megalon painter from Kavi Gupta's (Chicago) already very handsome roster. Go see one in person and then make your uncle (or whoever buy it). Ok. Go!

Adam tell us a little bit about your work, for those who have neither seen
nor heard of it.

For the past 7 years I have been pouring heavy amounts of liquid acrylic paint
onto super-cranked / tight canvases. On the surface, the work uses
representational pictorial languages. Below the surface, the DNA code is made up
of process based non-objective painting languages. The content of
the work is totally immersed in American vernacular visual culture and hyper
reified modern / contemporary art visual culture. The ridiculous and the sublime play
equally important roles in my work. There is also a generous helping of good ol'
American fear & paranoia.

So you started out in California doing your BFA, and then came to SAIC. What
kind of work did you start out doing? How did it come to this? Or were you making
gigantic awesome paintings from the get go? How did you fall in with Kavi's space?

The art department at Long Beach State was quite conservative. When I started the curriculum was almost exclusively centered around figure painting, drawing, and sculpture. There was really no escape. When you are a freshman in an art department and all of the work produced by the older students has a super technical proficiency you naturally are drawn to it. I saw a big painting of a mustard bottle and a shoe in one of the display cases...I thought that that was the shit!!! All I wanted to do was reproduce that
... But you couldn't just paint it like you felt it; you had to paint it like
Manet, or Sergeant, or Freud . . .the instructors were really dogmatic that
way. It was really tough and pretty discouraging at times. But, as always the
younger part-time faculty, were cool and would turn you on to what was happening in the
Los Angeles underground art scene. This one faculty member named Michael Miller
showed me that there are no rules and everything is permitted!!!! When I received that important piece of the puzzle I totally went off! It was as if I got plugged into giant electrical transformer. The rush of ideas was OVERWHELMING to say the least. From then on, everything I laid my eyes on became potential art objects. Soil, trash-cans, hang gliders, feathers, matches, found cassette tapes, eucalyptus leaves, spray string foam, snake skin hats etc . . .

Between experiments on the effects of LSD on my brainwaves, I would spend time in the school library devouring every book in the fairly limited and crusty art section. The art books stopped being current at about 1985. It was that they had a really deep section of texts dedicated to conceptual-dematerialized practices and minimalism / post-minimalism. I was on a steady diet of visual art from 1965 - 1975. I really loved it. I had really no conception of how outdated that stuff was. Now, it has all come back around. (i.e. the Whitney Biennial). Those books make the artists and the work from that period look so cool. Everything is photographed in black and white, totally drained
of seductive aesthetics, super tough, smart, take no prisoners attitude.

I got my BFA in Painting & Drawing from CSULB, but I had not made a painting in 3 years. I was making big installations, like, 1000 blue-tip matches
layered with dried up leaves surrounded by fucked up boom-boxes playing the Greenwich mean time signal. Total cluster-fuck aesthetics!!! I had also just seen the Helter Skelter Show at the Geffen Contemporary (MOCA), which really fucked me up in the best way!!!! The Helter Skelter show had the work of Raymond Pettibon, Mike Kelly, Lynn Foulkes, Lari Pittman, Victor Estrada, Chris Burden, Manuel Ocampo, Liz Larner, Meg Cranston, and Nancy Rubens. The work was visceral, dangerous to the social order, smart, scary, hilarious, pathetic, and muscular. In fact the Helter Skelter show was an actual turning point in my life. I learned how to be an artist from that
show. I learned how to get my attitude together. The timing for me was perfect.

After graduating with an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, I started a DIY space with other recent graduates Danielle Gustafson Sundell, Carrie Gundersdorf, and Andy Moore called Deluxe Projects. We ran it for three years (2000-2003) and did only solo shows. Most DIY spaces do group shows. It makes sense, because the spaces are usually run by 4-7 artists. The M/O for most DIY spaces is to get your own work out there by any means necessary. We did that for our first show, but after that we thought that it was lazy to keep showing our own work. So, we decided to start showing other peoples work. One of the cool things about art school is that you meet all of these intense and awesome artists. We realized that Chicago was this really artistically fertile place. So we just started talking to people that we all graduated with and pretty soon were doing
studio visits and then chose our first show!!! I learned as much about art making
running a collaborative space as I did in grad school.

Adam Scott, installation view, Kavi Gupta/Leipzig

My own studio practice was very private after grad school. I really was really
trashed-out on critiques. They were really great and brutal at SAIC, but I
really did not want any more unsolicited feed back for a while. So, I got a cheap
studio in a fucked up warehouse in Pilsen (between Chinatown and Little Village,
Chicago's Latino community) and started making paintings again. I had fucked
with various deconstructive modalities of late modernist and post-modern painting
and sculptural languages in grad school, but it was really experimental,
disposable, and not focused. Getting out of grad school was totally liberating!!!! I
made money by hustling teaching gigs at community colleges in and around the
"Chicagoland" area. I still teach to this day. For me, it's the best job ever. I really
love it. It's not like work at all. I teach at SAIC.

While I was being a monk in my studio trying to figure out what I am about, I
started making trips to various thrift-stores, junk stores, and antique malls around
Chicago. I went with my wife, Julie Whaley (fellow Californian), to most of these because she is a fashion designer and is the absolute queen-bee of thrift style!!!! I started to become interested in the massive piles of old and shredded up postcards. The images on these cards were typically oblique, blank, and colorful. The grass is always too green and the sky is always way too blue. Most of them dated from around 1950 to 1970. I was fascinated by the way these postcards claimed to represent specific places . . .
a Holiday Inn, an IHOP parking lot, a men's shoe store, the Kellogg's plant in Kalamazoo, the Grand Canyon. The postcards served simultaneously as souvenirs and portable monuments. I saw these postcards as extensions of American landscape painting
and American photo/cinematic traditions. Postcards create mini narratives that
re-thematize our perception of our collective identities. So, I started to appropriate the
postcard imagery. To me, they seemed like finished paintings on their own. I
started to cut up and re-collage different postcards together and use those as
templates for paintings. I realized that the American landscape is really a constructed
space. I started to construct fake landscapes made up of impossible elements from
the recent history of American pop-visual culture.

Kavi Gupta opened his space, then called Vedanta, in 1997. As word of
mouth spread about Deluxe Projects, Kavi, Julia Fischbach, and Kristen
VanDeventer started showing up to our openings, which included our small gallery space (300 square feet), a hallway, and a couple of tubs of iced beer (one dollar donation,
please!). Kavi had a space in one of his summer group shows and asked for one of my paintings. It was a painting of the Oklahoma City Federal building at the moment of its destruction. I then got a show at the Museum of Contemporary Art. It was the first year of the 12x12 show cycle. Since then, I have been represented by Kavi Gupta Gallery.

Adam Scott,
Green Zone, 2006,
acrylic on canvas,
70" x 76"

What influences your work? There is an obvious cartoon presence, but what
else. I usually find an artist has some generally unseen inspirations in there work,
to the public anyway. Where do the censorship elements in some of your work come from (like in Lay Down, Lay Down and Wait (like an animal)?

When I was 10 years old my parents took me to the Los Angeles County Museum of
Art and I saw a bunch of Ed Kienholz sculptures there. His work left an
indelible mark on my mind. When you are 10, it's hard to process the often-complex cultural data that visual art can deliver. Somehow I did internalize the
information, but it was for later use. Back Seat Dodge '38 stuck out to me the most. The sculpture consists of the shell of a 38 Dodge covered with
a blue velvet, as if it was flocked with it. The side door
is open to reveal two figures engaged in heavy back seat action. The woman is a
plaster figure and the man is made out of chicken wire. Beer cans are
strewn around the floor of the car and on the ground outside the passenger door. It
is hard to tell if the act was consensual or forced. The car radio is continually
crackling with weird-old music like Glenn Miller or something . . . very
creepy. I remember thinking to myself that somebody made this object. In a very
direct way, it made complete sense to me. The sound of the radio, the visuals, even
the smell of the gallery, and the sound of people's footsteps reverberating off of
the wood floors. I had a radical sense of belonging and I felt very calm.

Overall, I am very influenced by growing up in Los Angeles, Venice, and Santa Monica
specifically. Los Angeles is equal parts visual seduction / pleasure and profound alienation. To get a better idea of what I mean read Mike Davis' City Of Quartz and Ecology Of Fear. Growing up in the belly of media culture is pretty intense. The visual
perception of America has been, and to a great extent still is, produced by Hollywood.
That's where I intuitively learned the idea of the visual hook. The mix of Hollywood
glitz, Skid-Row, The Bloods, The Crips, Lowriders, Scientology, and Disneyland's
fake wholesomeness is all pretty weird.

In junior high, I discovered the underground music scene of Los Angeles. Black Flag, The Minutemen, Germs, X, Circle Jerks, Fear, Suicidal Tendencies, 45 Grave, Tex And The Horseheads, The Gun Club, The Mentors, The Mau Maus, The Berlin Brats, the Decedents, Aggression, Ill Repute, Rich Kids on LSD (that's more Nardcore or Oxnard to the uninitiated), Dr. Know, DRI (the first two albums) etc . . . the album art and flyer art of the punk subculture was the first ART that I felt was mine!!! I plastered my room with flyers like punk-rock wallpaper and started a band. The visual culture of the punk movement was high velocity, raw, brazen, disposable, and manic. The images these bands used were culled from literally any open source. I equate the visual tactics of punk to a non-ideological cultural butchery where no image was safe form the Exacto knife and the Xerox machine. In many ways, the punk aesthetic continues to inform the subatomic machinery of my own visual art production. The L.A. punk scene was my first art school.

Another influence on my work was the sense of impending catastrophe and cataclysm
that was cemented in my mind by living through the Los Angeles Rodney King riots /
uprising in the early 1990's and the devastating fires, mudslides, and earthquakes that
are indigenous to the southern California landscape. .
Armageddon in the noonday sun. Pop noir.

The cartoon look really came from the flat blocks of color I was using. I was actually trying to replicate the offset litho post card look. During my first solo show with Kavi Gupta Gallery, someone commented that the space in my work looks cartoon-like. After the show, I started to research American post-war animation. Obviously I had grown up watching Popeye, Tom & Jerry, Bugs, Daffy, Yosemite Sam etc . . . as most children of the 1970's and 1980's did.

I started to butcher up the different characters and sample them in my paintings. I also started to look at very politically incorrect animation of the post war period. Most of these now "banned" cartoons were used for propaganda purposes. Like Walt Disney's
Education for Death: The Making of the Nazi. This animation chronicles the story of Hans, a boy indoctrinated into the Nazi belief system. One of the most wrong animations I have ever seen. I also started to re-examine the animations of Ralph Bakshi. Films like Fritz The Cat, Heavy Traffic, Wizards . . . etc. The pixelization or the black-bar-blocking of the faces and genitatila of the various figurative elements in my work has to do with pictorial violence, witness protections programs, anonymity, and modernist abstraction.

So you just finished up a solo show @ Kavi Gupta's Leipzig space. This isn't the first time you have showed in Germany. How is your work responded to in Europe as opposed to the states?

My work gets a very interesting response in Germany. Other than Leipzig, I've shown in Berlin and Frankfurt. I've also shown in Oslo at the GAD, and in the Prague Biennale. I really love showing in Europe. People in the art scene are less interested in HOW you got the show and more interested in what your work is about. Here in the USA, we live in a more cutthroat and desperate way when it comes to navigating the gallery scene.

The European interest in my work has to do with its content. Every since 9/11 the world has been wondering what the fuck are we doing? There is both an exaggerated interest in our culture and a huge amount of skepticism about our role in the world. The content of my work deals directly with the visual residue of our "Americaness".

The show I just wrapped up at Kavi's new space in Leipzig was really interesting. I was showing in the belly of the Leipzig scene. My work looks very different from the work that permeates Leipzig. The opening was packed and I had a bunch of great critical conversations with other artists, gallerists, and collectors. Germans do not fuck around when it comes to supporting the visual arts.

Adam Scott, installation view, Kavi Gupta/Leipzig

For the Paint By Numbers show you pretty much made a variation of the exact same image ten times, this is unlike you past exhibitions. What made you decide to do this?

Recently, I have been making a lot of work to be shown at art fairs around the world, which can get weird and disembodied very fast. Art fairs require single pieces and I really wanted to make an entire trajectory... The Paint By Numbers show was for the DoArt gallery in Seoul, Korea. I wanted to experiment and take a risk. I never thought I would be showing my art halfway around the world. It was such a crazy idea that the only route to go was equally strange. I wanted to make a hybrid of my decidedly horizontal western landscape ideas and the more vertical compositions that come out of the Korean/Eastern traditions.

The show also had to do with repetition as pictorial violence and alienation. The title "Paint By Numbers" comes from a review of a past show of mine that said my work looks like "paint by numbers on steroids". I really loved that comment. I happen to be a fan of the paint by number phenomenon. It is a dirty pleasure of mine. It is so quintessentially American, flattened out, and democratic in the worst way!!! I was also thinking about "Waiting for Godot" and Becket's leanness.

The Paint by Numbers series was a way to put my practice under a brutal regimen. It's really monotonous to paint the same work over and over again. It was mentally and physically exhausting. What is really weird was that when I finished the 10 paintings, Cho Seung-hui shot up his classmates at Virginia State. I thought the cultural folding and imagery of that incident and my series of gun toting chopped up critters were strange and kind of morbidly perfect.

Adam Scott,
Untitled #4, 2007,
acrylic on canvas,
57" x 42"

I actually had never seen one of your paintings in person until the NEXT fair. (The big train one, what is the title for that?) There is a lot of surface activity that gets lost in the internet/in person translation. How do you pour/ or manipulate paint on such a massive scale?

I started pouring my paintings in 2001. After Gerhard Richter, I had no idea how to use a brush anymore. I felt that any brush mark was too referential for me. Plus, I'm really not a painter's painter. I'm more interested in Art. Techniques come out of necessity. I wanted to make blank, flat, gooey, thick, and colorful images. I wanted the surfaces to be homogenous. I want the viewer to try to figure how the work came into being.

I've always been interested in both ideas and processes. I am about thinking and playing. My journey as an artist has been about reconciling seemingly opposed actions. I spend months researching and making digital collages and studies on my computer. When I get into the studio, I just want to act in the moment/play in the mud. For example, the piece you saw at the NEXT show titled "Painting", had a 6-month research trajectory. The actual creation of the material object did not take nearly as long. I love the idea of representational imagery bubbling up out of a giant ocean of raw liquid plastic.

How do I manipulate the paint? I'm going to keep that secret. Mysteries are good for art.

Adam Scott,
Painting, 2008,
acrylic on canvas,
70" x 180"

Why are all you paintings really big?

I really don't think they are that big at all. I've only done two paintings that I consider big. The first would be the painting I made for my 12X12 show at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in 2002 and the work I just made for the Next Art Fair.
Those were both about 70" x 180".

My usual measurements are 70" x 76" or 60" x 66 (a more satanic measurement) or 30" x 36". The 70" x 76" proportion is the measurement of my body with my arms and legs stretched out. I view art scale in direct relation to human body scale. When a work is smaller than you it says one thing, if the work is as big as you it says another, and if the work is bigger than you an entirely new content unfolds.

Adam Scott,
Yes / No / Shut It, 2006,
acrylic on canvas,
60" x 66"

Do you have a favorite painting of yours? One that everytime you think about, you say, "Damn! I'm awesome".

I don't have a favorite painting. I tend not to think about best works or about how awesome I am. That can be a very slippery slope. All I want of my work is to effectively perform the material and conceptual tasks I set out for them. Actually, I think my new music project is pretty kick-ass!!!

Adam Scott,
Wait For It, 2005,
acrylic on canvas,
70"x 76"

What things do you love to do in Chicago? Like if some San Fransisco nerd was here and asked you what they should do for a weekend, you would tell them?

Eat at AVEC or Cafe Lula. After that, check out a live show at the new Bottom Lounge or the Empty Bottle or Mr. City (DIY noise/psychedelic) or the Lucky Gator Loft (DIY punk rock). Wake up the next day and go vinyl shopping at Permanent Records. Jam it on over to the West Loop to check out the galleries (go to Kavi Gupta Gallery first), have a snack Bari Foods (take a sandwich to go for the Airplane), then get your butt on the Blue-Line to O'Hare or the Orange-Line to Midway airport and cruise on back to SFO or OAK!! Do nerds exist in San Francisco?!?!?

Adam Scott,
Shit Creek, 2006,
acrylic on canvas,
70" x 76"

What do you have in stock for the future?

My wife, my sister and I just bought a beat up Victorian mansion to share in Wicker Park. Its right across form a state lockdown mental institution, quite charming and rustic in a Stanley Kubrick kind of way. We've been rehabbing it for 3 years and are about to finally move into it in August! I'll have my first in-house studio. We're stoked!

We haven't been featuring many interviews as of late. Let's change that up as we check in with a few local San Francisco artists like Kevin Earl Taylor here whom we studio visited back in 2009 (PHOTOS & VIDEO). It's been awhile, Kevin...

If you like guns and boobs, head on over to the Shooting Gallery; just don't expect the work to be all cheap ploys and hot chicks. With Make Stuff by Peter Gronquist (Portland) in the main space and Morgan Slade's Snake in the Eagle's Shadow in the project space, there is plenty spectacle to be had, but if you look just beyond it, you might actually get something out of the shows.

Fifty24SF opened Street Anatomy, a new solo show by Austrian artist Nychos a week ago last Friday night. He's been steadily filling our city with murals over the last year, with one downtown on Geary St. last summer, and new ones both in the Haight and in Oakland within the last few weeks, but it was really great to see his work up close and in such detail.

Congrats on our buddies at Needles and Pens on being open and rad for 11 years now. Mission Local did this little short video featuring Breezy giving a little heads up on what Needles and Pens is all about.

Matt Wagner recently emailed over some photos from The Hellion Gallery in Tokyo, who recently put together a show with AJ Fosik (Portland) called Beast From a Foreign Land. The gallery gave twelve of Fosik's sculptures to twelve Japanese artists (including Hiro Kurata who is currently showing in our group show Salt the Skies) to paint, burn, or build upon.

Backwoods Gallery in Melbourne played host to a huge group exhibition a couple of weeks back, with "Gold Blood, Magic Weirdos" Curated by Melbourne artist Sean Morris. Gold Blood brought together 25 talented painters, illustrators and comic artists from Australia, the US, Singapore, England, France and Spain - and marked the end of the Magic Weirdos trilogy, following shows in Perth in 2012 and London in 2013.

San Francisco based Fecal Pal Jeremy Fish opened his latest solo show Hunting Trophies at LA's Mark Moore Gallery last week to massive crowds and cabin walls lined with imagery pertaining to modern conquest and obsession.

Well, John Felix Arnold III is at it again. This time, he and Carolyn LeBourgios packed an entire show into the back of a Prius and drove across the country to install it at Superchief Gallery in NYC. I met with him last week as he told me about the trip over delicious burritos at Taqueria Cancun (which is right across the street from FFDG and serves what I think is the best burrito in the city) as the self proclaimed "Only overweight artist in the game" spilled all the details.

Ever Gold opened a new solo show by NYC based Henry Gunderson a couple Saturday nights ago and it was literally packed. So packed I couldn't actually see most of the art - but a big crowd doesn't seem like a problem. I got a good laugh at what I would call the 'cock climbing wall' as it was one of the few pieces I could see over the crowd. I haven't gotten a chance to go back and check it all out again, but I'm definitely going to as the paintings that I could get a peek at were really high quality and intruiguing. You should do the same.

The paintings in the show are each influenced by a musician, ranging from Freddy Mercury, to Madonna, to A Tribe Called Quest and they are so stylistically consistent with each musician's persona that they read as a cohesive body of work with incredible variation. If you told me they were each painted by a different person, I would not hesitate to believe you and it's really great to see a solo show with so much variety. The show is fun, poppy, very well done, and absolutely worth a look and maybe even a listen.

With rising rent in SF and knowing mostly other young artists without capitol, I desired a way to live rent free, have a space to do my craft, and get to see more of the world. Inspired by the many historical artists who have longed similar longings I discovered the beauty of artist residencies. Lilo runs Adhoc Collective in Vienna which not only has a fully equipped artists creative studio, but an indoor halfpipe, and private artist quarters. It was like a modern day castle or skate cathedral. It exists in almost a utopic state, totally free to those that apply and come with a real passion for both art and skateboarding

I just wanted to share with you a piece I recently finished which took me 4 years to complete. Titled "How To Lose Yourself Completely (The September Issue)", it consists of a copy of the September 2007 issue of Vogue magazine (the issue they made the documentary about) with all faces masked with a sharpie, and everything else entirely whited out. 840 pages of fun. -Bryan Schnelle

Jeremy Fish opens Hunting Trophies tonight, Saturday April 5th, at the Los Angeles based Mark Moore Gallery. The show features new work from Fish inside the "hunting lodge" where viewers climb inside the head of the hunter and explore the history of all the animals he's killed.

Beautiful piece entitled "The Albatross and the Shipping Container", Ink on Paper, Mounted to Panel, 47" Diameter, by San Francisco based Martin Machado now on display at FFDG. Stop in Saturday (1-6pm) to view the group show "Salt the Skies" now running through April 19th. 2277 Mission St. at 19th.

For some reason I thought it would be a good idea to quit my job, move out of my house, leave everything and travel again. So on August 21, 2013 I pushed a canoe packed full of gear into the headwaters of the Mississippi River in Lake Itasca, Minnesota, along with four of my best friends. Exactly 100 days later, I arrived at a marina near the Gulf of Mexico in a sailboat.

When works of art become commodities and nothing else, when every endeavor becomes “creative” and everybody “a creative,” then art sinks back to craft and artists back to artisans—a word that, in its adjectival form, at least, is newly popular again. Artisanal pickles, artisanal poems: what’s the difference, after all? So “art” itself may disappear: art as Art, that old high thing. Which—unless, like me, you think we need a vessel for our inner life—is nothing much to mourn.

Hard-working artisan, solitary genius, credentialed professional—the image of the artist has changed radically over the centuries. What if the latest model to emerge means the end of art as we have known it? --continue reading

"[Satire] is important because it brings out the flaws we all have and throws them up on the screen of another person," said Turner. “How they react sort of shows how important that really is.” Later, he added, "Charlie took a hit for everybody." -read on

NYC --- A new graffiti abatement program put forth by the police commissioner has beat cops carrying cans of spray paint to fill in and cover graffiti artists work in an effort to clean up the city --> Many cops are thinking it's a waste of resources, but we're waiting to see someone make a project of it. Maybe instructions for the cops on where to fill-in?

The NYPD is arming its cops with cans of spray paint and giving them art-class-style lessons to tackle the scourge of urban graffiti, The Post has learned.

Shootings are on the rise across the city, but the directive from Police Headquarters is to hunt down street art and cover it with black, red and white spray paint, sources said... READ ON

SAN FRANCISCO --- The Headlands Center for the Arts is preparing for their largest fundraiser of the year set to go down on June 4th at SOMArts here in the city. Art auction, food, drinks, live music, etc and all for helping to support a great institution up in the Marin Headlands. ~details

ABOUT HEADLANDSHeadlands Center for the Arts provides an unparalleled environment for the creative process and the development of new work and ideas. Through a range of programs for artists and the public, we offer opportunities for reflection, dialogue, and exchange that build understanding and appreciation for the role of art in society.

Just want to say congrats to Fecal Face's Rachel Ralph for graduating from SFAI with her masters in curatorial studies. Also want to congratulate Alex Ziv who also just got his MFA in painting. Also a high five to the talented Mario Ayala who also just graduated from SFAI as well! --- All super talented artists (thinkers), and we're excited to see what the future holds for them!

We haven't been featuring many interviews as of late. Let's change that up as we check in with a few local San Francisco artists like Kevin Earl Taylor here whom we studio visited back in 2009 (PHOTOS & VIDEO). It's been awhile, Kevin...

If you like guns and boobs, head on over to the Shooting Gallery; just don't expect the work to be all cheap ploys and hot chicks. With Make Stuff by Peter Gronquist (Portland) in the main space and Morgan Slade's Snake in the Eagle's Shadow in the project space, there is plenty spectacle to be had, but if you look just beyond it, you might actually get something out of the shows.

Fifty24SF opened Street Anatomy, a new solo show by Austrian artist Nychos a week ago last Friday night. He's been steadily filling our city with murals over the last year, with one downtown on Geary St. last summer, and new ones both in the Haight and in Oakland within the last few weeks, but it was really great to see his work up close and in such detail.

Congrats on our buddies at Needles and Pens on being open and rad for 11 years now. Mission Local did this little short video featuring Breezy giving a little heads up on what Needles and Pens is all about.

Matt Wagner recently emailed over some photos from The Hellion Gallery in Tokyo, who recently put together a show with AJ Fosik (Portland) called Beast From a Foreign Land. The gallery gave twelve of Fosik's sculptures to twelve Japanese artists (including Hiro Kurata who is currently showing in our group show Salt the Skies) to paint, burn, or build upon.

Backwoods Gallery in Melbourne played host to a huge group exhibition a couple of weeks back, with "Gold Blood, Magic Weirdos" Curated by Melbourne artist Sean Morris. Gold Blood brought together 25 talented painters, illustrators and comic artists from Australia, the US, Singapore, England, France and Spain - and marked the end of the Magic Weirdos trilogy, following shows in Perth in 2012 and London in 2013.

San Francisco based Fecal Pal Jeremy Fish opened his latest solo show Hunting Trophies at LA's Mark Moore Gallery last week to massive crowds and cabin walls lined with imagery pertaining to modern conquest and obsession.

Well, John Felix Arnold III is at it again. This time, he and Carolyn LeBourgios packed an entire show into the back of a Prius and drove across the country to install it at Superchief Gallery in NYC. I met with him last week as he told me about the trip over delicious burritos at Taqueria Cancun (which is right across the street from FFDG and serves what I think is the best burrito in the city) as the self proclaimed "Only overweight artist in the game" spilled all the details.

Ever Gold opened a new solo show by NYC based Henry Gunderson a couple Saturday nights ago and it was literally packed. So packed I couldn't actually see most of the art - but a big crowd doesn't seem like a problem. I got a good laugh at what I would call the 'cock climbing wall' as it was one of the few pieces I could see over the crowd. I haven't gotten a chance to go back and check it all out again, but I'm definitely going to as the paintings that I could get a peek at were really high quality and intruiguing. You should do the same.

The paintings in the show are each influenced by a musician, ranging from Freddy Mercury, to Madonna, to A Tribe Called Quest and they are so stylistically consistent with each musician's persona that they read as a cohesive body of work with incredible variation. If you told me they were each painted by a different person, I would not hesitate to believe you and it's really great to see a solo show with so much variety. The show is fun, poppy, very well done, and absolutely worth a look and maybe even a listen.

With rising rent in SF and knowing mostly other young artists without capitol, I desired a way to live rent free, have a space to do my craft, and get to see more of the world. Inspired by the many historical artists who have longed similar longings I discovered the beauty of artist residencies. Lilo runs Adhoc Collective in Vienna which not only has a fully equipped artists creative studio, but an indoor halfpipe, and private artist quarters. It was like a modern day castle or skate cathedral. It exists in almost a utopic state, totally free to those that apply and come with a real passion for both art and skateboarding

I just wanted to share with you a piece I recently finished which took me 4 years to complete. Titled "How To Lose Yourself Completely (The September Issue)", it consists of a copy of the September 2007 issue of Vogue magazine (the issue they made the documentary about) with all faces masked with a sharpie, and everything else entirely whited out. 840 pages of fun. -Bryan Schnelle

Jeremy Fish opens Hunting Trophies tonight, Saturday April 5th, at the Los Angeles based Mark Moore Gallery. The show features new work from Fish inside the "hunting lodge" where viewers climb inside the head of the hunter and explore the history of all the animals he's killed.

Beautiful piece entitled "The Albatross and the Shipping Container", Ink on Paper, Mounted to Panel, 47" Diameter, by San Francisco based Martin Machado now on display at FFDG. Stop in Saturday (1-6pm) to view the group show "Salt the Skies" now running through April 19th. 2277 Mission St. at 19th.

For some reason I thought it would be a good idea to quit my job, move out of my house, leave everything and travel again. So on August 21, 2013 I pushed a canoe packed full of gear into the headwaters of the Mississippi River in Lake Itasca, Minnesota, along with four of my best friends. Exactly 100 days later, I arrived at a marina near the Gulf of Mexico in a sailboat.

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